The BSD variant, FreeBSD, has just updated to version 7.0. According to announcements on the project’s website, performance and exploitation of multiple processor architectures have been greatly improved.

The developers point to internal benchmarks, which demonstrate an improvement of 350 percent in comparison to FreeBSD 6.0 at average load, and of around 1500% at high load levels. FreeBSD is also said to provide 15% better performance than the current Linux kernels (2.6.22 and 2.6.24). The distribution now uses a 1:1 Libthr threading model to process parallel requests by default. An improved ULE scheduler is also included, although it is not the default scheduler; this position is still held by the 4BSD scheduler.

With respect to filesystems FreeBSD now offers read-only support for XFS and experimental support for Sun’s scalable ZFS filesystem. Gjournal gives administrators the ability to add journaling to filesystems. The developers have also fixed some bugs relating to the Union FS virtual filesystem. On top of this, FreeBSD includes an experimental reference implementation of SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol), a connection-oriented transport protocol that serves as an alternative to TCP (specification in RFC 4960). In contrast to TCP, SCTP is held to be immune to Syn flooding and DoS attacks.

FreeBSD includes the KDE 3.5.8 and Gnome 2.20.2 desktops. It relies on X.org 7.3., includes GCC 4.2.1, and has improved support for developer boards with ARM architecture. You can download FreeBSD via an FTP server or the Bitorrent network. Links to both variants are available on the announce page.

Free software covers such a diverse range of utilities, applications, and other assorted projects that it can be hard to find the perfect tool. We pick the best of the bunch. This month we look at IPodder, FreeBSD 6, and SynCE.